Comment by turbare

Comment by Josephf

Comment by Brightstar

It looks like these will be BiS for Fury Warriors as well, once 4.0.6 hits in a week and our focus changes to Crit/Mastery for top 2ndary stats after 8% hit/26 expertise.

Comment by Nepturion

WTB - Contact Nepturion at Al'Akir (Horde)

Comment by Ineluki

For retribution paladins, the great thing about these boots in comparison to Massacre Treads is that they do NOT have expertise on them.

You may be like "what are you talking about, expertise is a great stat!" It certainly is, up to a point that is (the hard cap). After that hard cap, every single rating point is wasted. Remember that a good many of the readily available raid items out there have expertise on them. Some current raiding retribution paladins are now finding themselves well over the expertise cap, despite reforging expertise off every item they have it available on.

In situations like these, you are left wondering if you should either unglyph the awesome Glyph of Seal of Truth or pursue a "sidegrade" on an item of the same iLvL, but with different secondary stats. These boots offer you an excellent opportunity perform a sidegrade if you have them available. Don't overlook them.

Comment by bluewyvern

If you can use the expertise, massacre treads are still better for ret. They have an extra 20 mastery, as well as a 10 strength socket bonus, which beats the 10 crit socket bonus of these.

As for capping expertise, with full 359 gear, this shouldn't be a problem. There are not many pieces of 359 gear with expertise on them compared with the rating required for the cap and through reforging it is usually relatively easy to avoid it even when aiming for 16 expertise.

If you have massacre treads, and there is a warrior in the group who needs these, I would urge you to pass these on to them as it is a best in slot piece (before heroic pieces).

Comment by Shardcordal

Excellent boots for fury warriors. With critical and mastery + critical from gem it makes them great purchase. If you are lucky you'll get them on AH, not as cheap as valor boots, but much better.

Comment by Lifeonmars

That's absolutely not true that it's optimal to ignore the socket bonus.

My ret paladin models higher dps using a Str/hit gem and matching the socket bonus instead of using a straight Str gem.

This all depends on what the specifics of your gearset are and what kind of reforges you can squeeze out. There is no way to know other than modelling/reforge-optimizing.